what are we supposed to say again when christians ask us where we get our morality?

[max-greece]

Still not arbitrary. If you could show there was benefit for the species from any of the alternative moralities you suggest then you might have had a point in suggesting they were valid. Evolution through natural selection gave us the basic properties from which we formed out moralities. It can't be any other way.

Why should it benefit the species and not the individual? If a person took this selfish attitude they surely got it from evolution so that does not answer the question any. Apparently we steal, kill, and rape because we evolved to do so; so are these morally good actions?

One point - it appears as if you have started to reply without actually having read through my whole answer. You are raising issues I covered later on.

Were we not social mammals the selfish attitude would be the more beneficial, however, being social animals its simply not how things are.

We know this through the history of our species. There are many examples of activities that would never have happened were my version of human morality not correct. Farming is an example. Can you understand why?

You will have to explain how empathy, reciprocation and a basic sense of fairness fail to provide your "ought." As I see it, unless I am misunderstanding you, that is exactly what they give us.

No because you are only cherry-picking the human behaviors you personally like. If humans ought to engage in all behaviors and emotions that they evolved then that would include killing, stealing, lying, and raping and not just feeling empathy and compassion for others. This is why you cannot bridge that gap from the way things are to the way things ought to be. You have no basis for claiming people ought to engage in one behavior over another.
[/quote]

Humans do engage in all the activities they are capable of. Some are moral, some are not. Implementation of the tools that support morality through natural selection is merely good enough to maintain the species. If it isn't, the species doesn't survive. No society condones murder or theft from individuals or groups it recognises as being part of that society. If it did, that society would be very short lived indeed.

Religion (and politics) act to identify non-group members within the society enabling people to murder, rape and steal from them with impunity, often with the blessing of their God.

We have evolved the ability to overcome our instinctive morality along with other instincts too. This should not come as a surprise, and it isn't all bad news. Heroism, for example, is the over-riding of our strongest driving force - self preservation. Things cannot be morally good if they are not in the interests of the species and there would have to be exceptional circumstances for them not to be in the interests of individuals or groups.

How can you say we have overcome such behaviors when the last century was the most brutal mankind has ever witnessed? Secondly, why should people overcome such behaviors? We have made it thus far engaging in such behaviors and such behaviors are very common amongst other animals. Lastly, why do you keep putting the survival of the species as the standard of measurement? In a purely material universe why should I sacrifice my well-being just so that other bags of tissue and water called humans can be morn and live after I am gone? This does not make any sense without god.

You didn't understand what I was saying. Our natural behaviours are empathy, reciprocation and fairness. Those are the ones we can overcome to "do evil."

No other animal makes war on itself.

Survival of the species is the driver for any and all species on the planet. We are no different. God has nothing to do with it. God is about establishing power and allegiance between humans for the lowest cost.

At the same time we have to recognise that one of the best ways to get people to behave immorally is religion. Difficult to get people to fly planes into buildings without it.

Did not seem too hard to get people to try breeding apes with women and kill over 50 million fellow Russians without religion. Of course this was all for the “betterment” of the Russian people so apparently that means it was all morally good behavior.

No - it was morally abhorrent. You are correct, however, that religion is not the only way to get people to behave appallingly. Political ideology is a good substitute. In the case you mentioned it was communism but it could equally have been fascism.

I am not sure we do define universal differently - I just don't accept it as a concept. What I provided was as close as I can get - although a case could be made for including other species.

Societies get to dictate their moralities. Families and individuals get to define their's within the parameters of those of the society.

Why does it work this way? If I am the only person in Nazi Germany objecting to the mass murder of the Jews I am therefore morally wrong because society had already dictated otherwise?

Within the society, yes, you would be considered morally wrong. Were you in a different place at the same time or in another time you would be considered morally correct. Its easy to see which of these 2 positions is correct - just compare to our inherited characteristics.

History judges how well or badly they did.

How is this possible? If morals are determined by societies then how could later societies determine whether the morals of another society were good or bad? I hardly think Stalin cared what people 50 years later would think, he died the most powerful man on Earth and did so by lying, stealing, and killing his way to the top. Was he an evil man? If God exists, yes.

We determine good or bad morality by our inherited standard. Its not hard to do.

Interesting how useless God's consideration is, to us. What Stalin cared about is not the species concern. Ideally the species is concerned with is learning from the lessons of Stalin, or Hitler, Pol Pot and so on so we don't let those things happen again. Sadly we don't seem to be too good at learning. Maybe that will be the thing that actually kills off our species.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Humanity evolved morality, much like ants, bees, and termites, because moral action is evolutionarily conductive to the survival of the species.

Yes, but can an action not conductive to the survival of the human species still be moral? For example, wiping out the human race to preserve the biological viability of the planet as a whole.

No such dilemma has arisen. We can seemingly override our biological imperatives with heroism and other moral choices that go against self-preservation, and still perceive value from an evolutionary perspective because those valued traits preserve populations, and not just individuals.

---

Chad makes up bullshit to back up his position

Rampant insults others because he's a mindless dick with no adequate response to the question he's been asked.

That's fair, I do engage in a fair amount of douchebaggery. However, I still raise
indignant objection to the presupposition of an ethical code imposed several thousand years ago by an Abrahamic God as the only potential moral code, when human societies seem to have survived very well without the NT, and reject most of the "moral" principles stated therein.

The idea that this is the basis of all human morality is not only laughable, but repulsive.

[Esquilax]

Since using your definition we are only concerned with the well-being of sentient beings who are capable of moral thought then is it not morally wrong to torture animals?

Whoa, whoa, when did I ever say that only sentient beings who engage in moral thought are a part of our moral metrics? My definition concerns the well-being of all living creatures, whether or not they engage in moral thought; even if an animal can't participate in moral conversations, causing it unnecessary pain would still be immoral by virtue of the pointlessness of doing it. Why negatively impact any being for no reason?

Why does complexity only matter at the sentient level? That seems rather arbitrary. Does this also apply to the intelligence of the individual?

Arbitrary? The more sentient an organism is, the more potential it has for complex thought, emotional nuance, and so on. You lose more potential good, potential anything, through the elimination of a person than you do a fish.

This has two problems with it. Firstly, pain often does serve a purpose it prevents us from harming ourselves significantly. We stop running on an injured leg because it hurts, we do not get to close to fire because it hurts and so on.

You're conflating the sensation itself with the cause of the sensation. When I say we dislike pain, it's precisely because the purpose of pain is to notify us of bodily damage and to warn us away from danger. There's no sense in which pain ever signifies that something good is happening to you.

Secondly, you’re assuming that we ought to treat others the way we want to be treated (sounds familiar).

Yes, it does sound familiar: Confucius was saying it years before Jesus did.

Why? I see no basis for this. If someone can inflict pain on others and better their own situation then why not? Who are you to tell them they have to worsen their own situation just so not to inflict pain on others?

Because we require each other to survive, and a world in which we allow indiscriminate injury for personal gain is demonstrably worse off for everyone involved; our society is what allows us to thrive and become the dominant species on the planet, and that is predicated on a certain level of trust between one another, that we can share resources and expertise with the expectation that we won't turn on one another violently at the first opportunity. We are disparate parts that come together to create a functioning whole, and without that trust our ability to do so breaks down.

Your local supermarket stays open because the people working there can rely on you to keep to the social contracts and pay them money for your food, rather than just murdering them for it. If they couldn't, there would be no reason for them not to act in their own self interest and not come to work. Consequently, there would also be no reason for the producers of that food to sell it to the supermarket, as they'd have no assurance that the buyers wouldn't simply murder them and take the food. It all breaks down.

Is this really such a complicated concept that you needed to be told it, Stat?

It’s unpleasant yes, not always bad.

True, when I get a flu shot the temporary pain is mitigated by the benefit I gain from the shot, which is why this is a general rule and not an all encompassing absolute. Context is an important consideration.

You’re still making a huge jump here. Sure, sentient beings are capable of creating moral systems and following such systems but I still see nothing that compels us to do so if we live in a purely material universe.

Again, we live better cooperatively than competitively.

Joseph Stalin died the most powerful man on Earth, why should a person not live their life like him?

Yes, and he became that on the back of the death and suffering of many other people, and most notably, his regime was in no way self-sustaining. If it had continued, things would only have gotten progressively worse; you can't build a society like that.

He’s feeding the worms now but if there is no god we all will be someday. Why should we care what worm food comes after us?

It's another facet of the social contract: we stand on the foundations given us by the previous generation, and we pass that along to ensure the survival of our species.

Incidentally, are you saying that you only do any good work now because you expect eternal reward later? And you question my moral foundation?

Why should we care about any worm food besides ourselves? In the words of Himmler, “What compels us to keep our promises?” More precisely, if a person can better their own well-being, then why not hurt others?

Answered above.

No games here; I think this is a legitimate question. If morality only pertains to sentient beings then it seems to follow that all acts against non-sentient beings are permissible and amoral. There are girls who are date raped and have no recollection of the event; is this act still immoral? I’d say yes, but given your definition it would appear not.

Unconscious is not non-sentient, Stat. It's a temporary cessation of certain brain functions, but it's not a lack of sentience.

Many people commit adultery and are never caught. If god exists this act is still morally wrong, given your definition of morality it would not appear to be. Your sort of pragmatic approach to morality falls apart when applied to very simple situations such as the ones above.

Adultery is the deliberate breaking of a social contract, albeit a less vital one. I've already explained why it's in our best interests to maintain our social contracts, even if we aren't caught breaking them.

[Cato]

It's not that easy. Some of us are compatibilists.

As in you believe in the compatibility of God’s pre-ordination and man’s will?

If you don't know what compatibilism is you should refrain from participating in discussions of morality that are more than surface deep.

Despite my previous answer, I don't really run around kicking people in the balls.

The typical way I handle this is to ask my interlocutor if believers are big on stoning to death disobedient children. After the obvious answer I then point out that the standard of good and evil for believers is also extra biblical. No amount of goal post shifting or obfuscation can avoid this conclusion.

You’ll have to be more specific.

You have this backward. I gave a concrete example. You must then be looking for something more general or abstract.

Believers don't follow all the moral edicts written in the Bible; therefore, the standard of good and evil is outside the Bible.

[CharnelRC]

Oh good, well then logically prove it for me…
Why is logic universal? How would logic being universal necessitate that morality is universal?

You ask me to logically prove it to you while not knowing that logic is universal? That's like trying to prove an equation to someone who can't count.
First learn why logic is universal and then I'll show you the correlation between the two.

[Tonus]

They would be moral to the members of the society that defined them as such. I would not call them good, as I would not personally think that it's good to kill a person in either circumstance.

Why would you not think that? If the act could be stipulated as good or bad why do you have an opinion either way on its goodness?

I can empathize and sympathize with others, and I would not want to be killed. I am aware that some people kill themselves, but usually it is because they are in a poor state of mind. Therefore I think it's reasonable to think that people do not want to die, and that being killed is bad from that standpoint.

My point is that few actions can be judged independent of context. Perhaps there are no actions that could be objectively labeled as bad. I pointed out one action that I cannot make conform to that idea.

Contextually how are you defining what is right and wrong? Who determines whether enough justification was given for the action? Thanks for your thoughts; they’re interesting.

I think there are two levels; that of the individual, and that of the society or community. A person on his own can use his sense of empathy or sympathy and his life experiences to form opinions on what is good or bad, or right or wrong, and these provide his moral framework. The more isolated he is, the more varied those might be. A society forms laws and cultural attitudes in a similar way, but they do so more via committee. It probably takes longer for a society to determine a set of morals, but those can also be in effect much longer.

[Heliocentrism]

I haven't any burning desire for a social disease. I don't think I'm alone in this mindset.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Are behavioral dispositions moral because they evolved or did they evolve because they are moral?

Better to say that prosocial behavioral dispositions evolved because they had survival value. Does that make them moral? No. Does it underpin what we describe as moral. Most likely. Morality is more like beauty than it is like reality. There is no objective basis for morality.

Perhaps. Morality has practical applications that extend into personal and public life much differently than aesthetics. It sounds like you put morality in the category of preference rather than proprietary. If so then the concept of justice has no foundation and I hate to say this because I know it peeves you but that's moral nihilism.

[Whateverist]

Better to say that prosocial behavioral dispositions evolved because they had survival value. Does that make them moral? No. Does it underpin what we describe as moral. Most likely. Morality is more like beauty than it is like reality. There is no objective basis for morality.

Perhaps. Morality has practical applications that extend into personal and public life much differently than aesthetics. It sounds like you put morality in the category of preference rather than proprietary. If so then the concept of justice has no foundation and I hate to say this because I know it peeves you but that's moral nihilism.

I'll try not to be peevish toward the word. Is the absence of an objectively based morality identical to moral nihilism? Why not moral relativist? I guess I'd rather not focus on the words. If you mean to attribute to me the belief that morality is personal, elastic and resistant to absolutes then yes, count me in. I don't find that description at all alarming. Should I?

[Violet]

What you do... is you tell them this:

"I get my morality from an explosively psychopathic sheep."

If they do not take a step backwards: you stab them. If they run away from you: you shoot them. If they give you a hug: they'z just like you.